When Bernie Sanders famously said: “Enough of those damned emails,” many thought they’d heard the death-knell of that wearisome argument. Just this week, President Obama referred to it as “all that noise,” designed to confuse new voters about Hillary’s trustworthiness. The concept of “noise” comes from cybernetics and it refers to anything that interferes with a message sent by one party to another–we laymen also know it as static. Sad to say, we are all familiar with static on our cell phones which keep us from hearing the other person’s words and messages. The static in this case, as we all know by now, are the dark references to some of Hillary’s emails. Of the emails, President Obama also noted that while Clinton, while serving as his Secretary of State, made an “honest mistake” by using a private email server, as it was now “being blown up into just some crazy thing,” which will affect new voters when they hear “all that noise.” Why now, you may ask, all of this focused static. Well,...

Seventy years of bi-partisanship have gone into creating a credible deterrence strategy to cope with the challenges posed to our foreign policy in an era of nuclear powers and the means of delivering them. Our deterrence strategy rests upon the elimination and reduction of doubt as to whether certain actions against ourselves and our allies will produce a response by the U.S. that is unacceptable to a potential enemy. The weaving of alliances and other measures taken to implement and maintain this strategy has been supported by every President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, both Republican and Democratic, since the fateful dropping of those early atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and ushered in the dangerous nuclear age. This credibility of our response and commitments to our allies have been seriously, if not fatally, weakened by Donald Trump’s clearly ignorant insertion of doubt into the equation. He might as well have invited North Korea across the “no-man’s land” and across the 38th parallel and on into our...

As we move into the deep stretch in the race for Iowa’s convention votes and close to the election in New Hampshire, candidates are pulling out all the stops. Trump continues seeding doubts as to Cruz’s eligibility to be president, and has focused personal attacks on Cruz’s nastiness, calling Cruz the most disliked Senator by his colleagues–which may well be close to the truth. Trump also got the endorsement of Tea Party favorite Sarah Palin, which was all the more pointed since she played a big part in coalescing Tea Party support for Cruz in the Texas race that made him a U.S. Senator. Trump, himself, continues to insult a variety of targets, while calling for a 45 percent tariff on goods coming from China, despite warnings that to do so would hurt our economy, produce a trade war with China, and, no doubt, lead to China retaliating with their own increased tariff on our exports to them. Trump’s absurd proposed tariff, most economists feel, would have dire consequences. It is,...

December 12 UPDATE–CBS released their national poll that more or less confirmed the CNN poll results cited below. Therefore, we can remove the outlier label from the latter poll. Two polls now have Trump’s national numbers in the mid-thirties–a significant threshold, if he maintains those numbers. It should be noted that CBS finished their polling before Trump’s controversial proposal to prevent all Muslims from entering the country. So we haven’t yet seen the effect of the immediate and widespread criticism of Trump and his latest proposal. More on that below, it is worth noting that Trump hotels and buildings in Dubai and other of our allied Islamic countries have removed his name from the properties, and they have banned sales of Trump’s branded merchandise. So much for him being the great unifier who will get moderate Islamic countries to do the ground fighting in Syria against ISIS. Trump is oft likened to the far Right Le Pen, in France, who today added her voice to those who are rejecting Trump’s ideas....

Donald Trump continues to make outrageous statements. Last week he mocked a reporter with a disability that doesn’t permit him to control his arms. In doing so, Trump crossed a line of decency that has been well established. This week, on Fox News (Fox & Friends), he ignored the Geneva Convention that the U.S. has long supported, and urged the killing of families of ISIS terrorists. “When you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families,” he argued. No more concern for “collateral damage.” Instead, target them! On December 7, he proposed keeping all Muslims from coming into the country. By definition that would keep out the representatives of our allied countries in the regions: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey and the Gulf States. One outrageous statement, generally thought to be offensive to most Americans, after another. Mainstream Republican politicians have long shuddered at the prospect of a Trump candidacy, feeling that not only would he lose, but he would take down other Republican candidates with him. They have been waiting longer than...

By now most of you have heard that Turkey, our NATO ally, shot down a Russian military jet on Tuesday, November 24th. Some of the details are murky at this writing. Russian President Putin claims it was a “stab in the back,” that their plane had not crossed into Turkish air space, and the pilot was not given any warnings. Turkey, for its part, insists that their air-space was encroached and that they gave the Russian pilot ten warnings before their F-16 shot him down. The Turkish military has released a recording of a Turkish speaker saying, “change your heading.” Konstantin Murakhtin, the Russian navigator who was rescued yesterday, insists that they received no warnings. Videos of the Russian plane being hit and going down has gone viral on the internet, but it focuses on the distant sky and does nothing to answer the questions of airspace location and the presence or absence of warnings. Nor does it deal with the meaningful issue of what the Russian Su-24 fighter-bomber was doing...